“One hundred grand. That’s how much I’ve made on Amazon in the last three weeks … from my self-pubbed books. The one’s the Big 6 rejected. I am sooo glad I had so many books rejected. … This [Kindle] has become the best way in the history of mankind for a writer to earn money.”
—Joe Konrath, techno-thriller author1
Digital publication now dwarfs POD in popularity. An e-book is less expensive to produce, and it can reach many more markets overnight. True, some still cling to the physical book, but these romantics will soon go the way of the dinosaur.
According to BookStats, 2011 electronic book sales reached nearly $2 billion. The previous year, e-books grew by 400 percent in Europe. PricewaterhouseCoopers projects sales in excess of $10 billion by 2016.2 Currently the 200,000 ePlatinum Club has thirty-seven members—authors who have sold between two million and 200,000 self-published titles—and the list is rapidly growing.3
From the writer’s point of view, digital publication may be preferable to traditional in five important ways.
On the other hand, the comparative merits of traditional publication cannot be underestimated.
This is, in fact, what happened to Mark Coker, author of The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success. His novel, Boob Tube, about TV soap operas, was roundly rejected. So, in 2008, he founded Smashwords and published 140 e-titles. Four years later, he released 200,000. The “superhero of electronic books,” as he is now called, has become one of the largest international e-book producers. Smashword authors control their own rights, are distributed free to multiple platforms (Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Sony, Apple) and collect up to 85 percent of sales receipts. By contrast, “Vanity publishing services will gladly empty your pocket of thousands of dollars for services of nebulous value,” Coker argues.4
New literature titles, both traditional and non, were 29 percent down in 2011 and continue to slide.5 Even so, according to former HarperCollins head Jane Friedman, e-publication could help save serious fiction. After pledging, “I’m not done by a long shot,” at her traditional postmortem party in 2008, the editor founded Open Road Integrated Media the next year. Electronic publication will become “the center of the universe,” she told The New York Times.6 In partnership with Grove Atlantic, Friedman’s Open Road digitally resurrects classic novelists7 as well as today’s masters.8
Publishing maven Tina Brown founded her own e-imprint, Beast Books, in 2009. The operation, in partnership with Perseus Books, speedily releases 40,000-word-and-under political and cultural pieces by the pundits of Newsweek (which, due to the high cost but declining revenue of print, went all digital in 2013). The former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker told The New York Times that in today’s fast-paced world too many print titles are fatally dated by the time they reach the shelves.9 “One of the big criticisms that one hears about print books is that by the time they get out it’s too late and who cares,” agrees publishing consultant Constance Sayre of Market Partners International. “The only thing I worry about is that everybody’s writing and nobody’s reading.”
Stephen King was an e-revolution pioneer. In 2000, he released the world’s first mass-market e-book, Riding the Bullet, about a hitchhiker picked up by a dead, decapitated guy whose head has been sewn back on. The author said he decided to offer the novella as an e-book “to see … whether or not this is the future.” Four hundred thousand copies were downloaded the first day, jamming Simon & Schuster’s Softlock server. Seeing that this was indeed the future, many other best-selling authors followed in King’s footsteps. With Amazon’s introduction of Kindle in 2007, nearly everybody was onboard.
Twitter had been introduced the year before. As soon as the 140-character social networking microblog proved itself more revolutionary than ridiculous, the Twitter story was born. Pulitzer Prize winner and New Yorker “Writer for the 21st Century” Rick Moody was among the first to give it a try in 2009. A haiku fan, the novelist was attracted to what he called “the merciless brevity” of the T-Story, no less than to the “Wild West environment” of electronic publication. Most importantly, “I hope that it will lead people back to books.”10 Electric Literature ran his 153-Tweet online dating flash fiction, “Some Contemporary Characters,” in hourly increments for three days. EL founder Andy Hunter, a Brooklyn College MFA, gained ten thousand site followers from the piece, proving Twitter an exciting new literary tool. “That,” he said, “is what literature is all about.” The L Magazine went further, declaring that Electric Literature itself was “the best sign that perhaps the end of the publishing industry as we know it won’t be the utter disaster we’re all dreading.”
Soon two more Pulitzers gave Twitfic a shot. Salman Rushdie retweeted his Tumblr tale, “A Globe of Heaven.” The New Yorker magazine posted Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” on its Twitter account for nine days in the spring of 2012. That fall, AllTwitter kicked off its Flash Fiction Contest; the UK, its five-day Twitter Fiction Festival; and seventy-one Joyce fans tweeted Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, The Guardian ran Twitfics from twenty-one heavyweights including Jeffrey Archer, Geoff Dyer, and Ian Rankin.
“Blaise Pascal didn’t tweet and neither did Mark Twain,” began the story by the UK MIllennium Poet and Iowa Workshop prof Simon Armitage. “When it came to writing something short and sweet, neither Blaise nor Mark had the time.”
Hemingway, however, allegedly did have the time. Legend has it that Hemingway won a bar bet by composing the first Twitfic on an Algonquin bar napkin: “Classified: Baby Goods. For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”
The king of brevity already knew what the Memory & Cognition Journal discovered in 2013: To the average reader, not just those with ADD, a bite-size literary chunk such as a Tweet is more memorable and “mind-ready” than Remembrance of Things Past.
1 A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/01/100000.html
2 Jim Lichtenberg, “Building The New Business Model,” Publisher’s Weekly, October 29, 2012.
3 For names and scores, see: http://selfpublishingsuccessstories.blogspot.com
4 David Henry Sterry, “Mark Coker, Founder of Smashwords, on How to Get People to Read Your Book,” Huffington Post, February 24, 2012. www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/mark-coker_b_2594203.html
5 “Book Production By the Numbers,” Publishers Weekly, May 23, 2011, Vol. 258, Issue 21.
6 Motoko Rich, “New E-Book Company to Focus on Older Titles,” New York Times, October 13, 2009.
7 Pearl Buck, Erskine Caldwell, Howard Fast, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones, Malcolm Lowry, Edna O’Brien, Bud Schulberg, Terry Southern, William Styron, Rebecca West, Jean Paul Sartre, Joseph Heller, Ellery Queen, etc.
8 Michael Chabon, Nicola Barker, Pat Conroy, James Salter, Alice Walker, Susan Minot, Joyce Maynard, etc.
9 Motoko Rich, “Daily Beast Seeks to Publish Faster,” New York Times, September 28, 2009. www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/books/29beas.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=The%20Daily%20Beast&st=cse&
10 Alexandra Alter, “Are Tweets Literature? Rick Moody Thinks They Can Be,” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2009/11/30/are-tweets-literature-rick-moody-thinks-they-can-be/